Holding Biden Accountable

Liam Rue '21

March 2021

Due to his predecessor’s incendiary rhetoric as well as his polarizing far-right agenda, it’s no surprise that President Biden has remained popular among his Democratic base.

Though this low bar also makes it harder to hold him accountable on his promises for sweeping liberal reforms. When Biden ran as a centrist whose main goal was simply to replace Trump, his supporters assured more hesitant progressives that Biden would move further to the left once he was in office.

Sure enough, to appeal to the insurgent Sanders wing of the party, Biden has adopted many left-wing policies he once opposed. On February 1, for instance, he announced the creation of a task force to reunite migrant families separated at the border. Similarly pleasing was his appointment of Deb Haaland as Interior Secretary and his announcement that his administration would end contracts with private prisons. With these and other actions, Biden has thwarted accusations that his centrist -- if not conservative -- history makes him a Trump-lite.

Though on other fronts, the new president has given skeptics on the left reason to remain wary. This includes his refusal to pass full $2000 checks, his controversial appointment of Lloyd Austin as Defense Secretary, and his refusal to cancel student debt or expunge nonviolent cannabis offenses.

Liberal defenders of Biden have in response argued that Americans are simply expecting too much of him: he was just inaugurated, and perhaps he needs more time to flesh out certain parts of his agenda.

It begs the question of whether Biden’s supporters would defend these actions if it were Trump making them. Indeed, liberals across the spectrum who attacked Trump and the Republicans for refusing to support $2000 checks and a more comprehensive stimulus are now telling taxpayers to be grateful for the $1400 coming their way. According to them, Biden is better than the alternative, so he can break a few promises here and there that for Trump would be inexcusable.

In this way, Biden is shaping up to be much like his former boss and Democratic predecessor Barack Obama. Though seen as a solidly liberal president, Obama’s eloquence and charm belied many not so liberal actions: his administration’s drone strikes in the Middle East; his downplaying of the Flint water crisis; his administration's large number of deportations; his ambivalence to the Black Lives Matter movement; and the controversial bailouts after the 2008 meltdown.

From his 30 years as a senator of Delaware, Biden has had his own notoriously conservative record. He has particularly been in the pocket of credit card companies, the bulk of which are located in Delaware for tax reasons.

In 2005, for instance, Biden played a key role in helping pass the “Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act”, which stripped protections for Americans saddled with student loan debt and, ironically, has exacerbated the student debt crisis he campaigned on solving.

Even more notorious now is his support for the 1994 crime bill, which has come back to haunt him as Americans in both parties have begun to reject tough on crime policies. Given this history of support for these conservative policies, progressives and Bernie Sanders supporters have good reason to be skeptical of a Biden presidency.

What progressives and Democrats of the Sanders wing predicted in the runup to the election was that Biden and the establishment would continue to delay radical changes that they campaigned on. First, during the election, more left-wing policies were sidelined in order to make Biden more “electable”. Once Biden was elected, critics reasoned, Democrats under Biden would renege on their promises of sweeping reform in fear of losing the midterm elections.

The logical conclusion of this is that Democrats will be crushed in the 2022 midterms after (unsuccessfully) trying to compromise with Republicans instead of making the changes they campaigned on.

The last time Democrats tried to work with Republicans when they had a majority under Obama, it wasted precious time they could have spent making more comprehensive legislation to help Americans. Fittingly, they were swamped in the 2010 midterms. A wave of Republicans took over hundreds of seats across all levels of government, and just like that Obama and Democrats became sitting ducks.

If Biden decides to care too much about what Republicans think, there is little in the way of a repeat of 2010. The result would be that the bulk of whatever important changes they make now will be erased by a new Republican majority and -- potentially two years later -- a new Republican president in the vein of Trump seizing on the Democrats’ inaction.

In order for progressives to ensure that Biden goes through with all of the policies he campaigned on -- and then some -- they’re going to have to challenge him in the same way that they challenged Trump. (Or, more appropriately, in the way that conservatives ground Democrats’ agenda to a halt in 2010 with the Tea Party movement.)

Based on not only his conservative record in the Senate but also the record of the Obama administration, the left shouldn’t expect Biden to deliver on his most ambitious promises on his own. It will take not only organizing on the ground but also threatening to withhold their votes to ensure that Democrats make good on their promises while they can. Of course, pushing Democrats to the left does put them at greater risk of losing the midterm elections. But it is still less risky than the alternative of letting them get complacent.